...Prime Minister Winston Churchill told listeners about the horrors of World War II: "Whole districts are being exterminated. Scores of thousands–literally scores of thousands—of executions in cold blood are being perpetrated by the German police troops," he said. "We are in the presence of a crime without a name." Did you know Raphael Lemkin created a word to describe the Nazi’s way of killing the Jewish people, by using the ancient Greek word genos, (which means race and tribe) and the word Latin cide, (which means killing)? IT WAS GENOCIDE! Raphael Lemkin created the word Genocide because he lost his family in the Holocaust. Genocide is a mass murder that develop in ten stages: classification, symbolization, discrimination, dehumanization,...
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...The Holocaust is one of the biggest and most widely known genocides in history. The Holocaust is famous for introducing many killing methods, such as the infamous gas chambers. One thing the Nazis were notorious for, other than the mass killings, was the horrible treatment of their prisoners. Millions of prisoners died under the Nazis due to various factors, such as disease, abuse by the guards, and the weather. Firstly, the prisoners were severely abused by the prison guards. The guards were quiet sadistic towards the prisoners and abusing them was a manifestation of it. The guard’s and prison staff’s abuse towards the prisoners varied. It would range from beatings to medical experiments. The guards would look for various reasons to beat the...
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...The Holocaust is a horrifying subject that started in the early 1940’s and mid-WWII. The Holocaust was formed by Adolf Hitler (Allen 5). He directed a team of people called Nazis to build the concentration camps (Allen 5). The Nazis killed many people during the Holocaust including Jewish men, women, and children. It all started with one camp called Auschwitz where many people died including author and holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel’s family. The Holocaust is also a time in history when millions of people were persecuted in Europe by being sent to live in ghettos and eventually being deported to concentration camps where they were systematically annihilated until the Allied forces liberated the remaining survivors. The Nazis forced Jews into the ghettos to separate them from the rest of the population (“Ushmm Ghettos”). Adolf Hitler was in charge at the time and created three different types of ghettos for different type of treatments and torture (“Ushmm Ghettos”). The three types were closed ghettos, open ghettos, and destruction ghettos. The closed ghettos were isolated and closed off. The prisoners there had no freedom, starved, and...
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...The Horrors of France According to popular beliefs, the Holocaust in Nazi Germany was one of the most tragic events to have ever occurred in Jewish history; unfortunately it wasn’t the only one. The French Holocaust imprisoned over 38,000 Jewish citizens; roughly 780 of them would survive. (Laffitte) Not all Jewish peoples were just rounded up and thrown into trucks; some were actually “immune” to relocation. (Curtis)These special peoples had to carry slips, and papers to show they were legally allowed to be outside of the camps. There were several unknown levels of clearance for the Jewish peoples. Not much is known about the levels but what is known is that, there were curfews for most, and only wealthy, powerful, influential Jewish peoples...
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...“For me the Holocaust was not only a Jewish tragedy, but also a human tragedy,” said Simon Wiesenthal. “After the war, when I saw that the Jews were talking only about the tragedy of six million Jews, I sent letters to Jewish organizations asking them to talk also about the millions of others who were persecuted with us together – many of them only because they helped Jews.” Mr. Wiesenthal was just one of the survivors from the brutal Holocaust who will forever remember the worst time of his life. How he was torn away from his family and was used as a slave for the Nazis. Yet he was still able to have sympathy and think about others. The Holocaust had a significant impact on America by giving lessons about genocides and preventing other genocides, how they punished war criminals after the...
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...They say, “Poor fellow. He’s gone mad,”(Wiesel, 17). In both of these texts a warning about the horrors of the Holocaust is ignored. However, in the book Night, a victim lives to tell of the horrid acts of the Nazis, but in The Berlin-Bucharest Express a person aiding the victims passes along a story she heard from one of the Nazi officers. Also, in the narrative the Nazi officer is so remorseful he is in fits of tears, but in Night Nazi officers are portrayed as being heartless and remorseless machines. For example, on page 16 of Night it reads, “Without passion, without haste, they slaughtered their prisoners.” A similarity the two pieces have is their tone. The tone in both texts is somber and anxious. “From that moment, everything happened very quickly. The race toward death had begun.”(Wiesel, 20) This excerpt shows the anticipation and melancholy...
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...The Holocaust was a very horrifying event that millions of Jews experienced. Not many Jews survived the horrors of the Holocaust, but the several hundred thousand that did never spoke out. They fell silent and decided not to speak of it. I believe they were too traumatized by the experience to even say a word. There were no words to describe what they went through, but fortunately, they did write about their experiences. A few of the survivors wrote books and poems to tell their stories and to let people know what truly happened. They did not want this event to fade from history and they definitely did not want this event to repeat itself. They used poems and books to speak of the unspeakable, but they never felt like they have said enough....
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...In his book Night, Elie Wiesel uses tone to express the many hardships that the Jews were forced to face during the Holocaust. He also cleverly used it throughout the story to express the strength of a father/son bond even in the face of hardship. The narrator's love for his father was, at times, the only reason he had to keep up the constant struggle to live. "The idea of dying, of ceasing to be, began to fascinate me. To no longer exist. To no longer feel the excruciating pain of my foot" (Wiesel, 86). In this quote, Wiesel is setting up a tone of surrender, of hopelessness. And the Jewish people don’t want to believe what’s in front of them. “She’s mad, poor soul…” this quote shows how they knew Madame Schächter wasn’t talking about a real fire bout about something else. Something they didn’t want to believe. Elie uses many tone, foreshadowing and diction to help enforce what he knew about the holocaust. The tone of the novel is greatly influenced through the fact that the story is autobiographical. There seems to be only one agenda utilized by Elie in regards to the tone of the story as he presents the information for the readers’ evaluation. The point of the story is to provide the reader an emotional link to the horror of the holocaust through the eyes of one whom experienced those horrors. He presents the facts as to what he saw, thought, and felt during those long years in the camps. “The shock of this terrible awakening stayed with us for a long time. We still trembled...
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...words. One of the most famous graphic novels to date, Maus by Art Spiegelman is exemplary of this characteristic, seeing as it sheds light on the horrors of the Holocaust, one of the most difficult historical events to conceptualize. Using the unique format of the graphic novel and the literary elements of symbolism...
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...Josh Thompson History Ms. Kadlecek 7 April 2014 Remembering The word holocaust means “sacrifice by fire” and comes from the Greek words “holos” meaning whole and “kaustos” meaning burnt. The Holocaust of the 20th century was the mass murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi command during World War II. In Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night, he states, “…in their early days of their accession to power, the Nazis in Germany set out to build a society in which there simply would be no room for Jews. Toward the end of their reign, their goal changed: they decided to leave behind a world in ruins in which Jews would seem never to have existed” (viii). The shock and horror does not lessen regardless of how many times a book or article is read or a movie watched about the Holocaust. Learning about the horrible, dark period from 1935 – 1945 is important in several ways. On one hand, it has been said we must learn about the past in order not to relive it. However, we are also told not to dwell in the past. When studying the Holocaust, both adages have truth. Chilling questions occur when learning about the Holocaust. They are questions that Elie Wiesel repeated in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. Wiesel says he remembers asking his father, “Who would allow such crimes to be committed? How could the world remain silent?” (118). Millions of Jews were killed by overwork, starvation, torture, and cold blooded murder just because they were a different race and...
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...Throughout the movie, "The Holocaust", the phrase, "I just do my job," was usually the only excuse most people who committed crimes against the Jews could come up with. For example, when Helena and Rudy Weiss were staying in Kiev, the city was bombed. During the bombing, one of the Nazi soldiers, who happened to be Heinz Muller, a friend of Inga's family, was hit by falling debris. Hesitant, Rudy helped Muller escape from the collapsing building, gave him some water, and asked him why he was taking part in the mistreatment of the Jews. "I obey orders," Muller replied, unrepentant about what he did. Also, when Bertha Weiss was sent to the gas chambers in Auschwitz, Dr. Joseph Weiss asked the Kapo what happened to her. The lady bluntly retorted, "Don't blame me, I just take orders." Whether to keep a job, remain loyal to their cause, or just because they had no other excuse, everyone used that phrase to justify what they did wrong against the Jews. Anti-Semitism and unfair grudges are two factors that can cause Genocide. During the movie, Eric Dorf claimed he did not feel bad about Kristallnacht or what happened to the Jews, because he said the Jews provoked it. Even though Kristallnacht was the first major pogrom, a government sponsored attack on the Jews, and was terribly destructive, Eric said that they killed Christ and they deserved what they got (The Holocaust). In addition, Heydrich believed that Germans and the Aryan race was superior to the Jewish race and they had to...
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...The Holocaust was a terrible and traumatizing experience for the prisoners, but have you ever thought about what happened to the survivors? How did they get back to their normal lives? Well if you have, you're in luck, I wrote a whole paper on it. Following their liberation, the lives of Holocaust survivors were hurt by long-lasting physical illnesses, mental health issues, and difficulty returning to their lives before their imprisonment. Descendants of the holocaust damaged by physical illnesses caused by the Holocaust. Some Holocaust victims also suffered from mental health issues because of their experiences imprisoned in the camps. They also suffer from not ever able to settle back into normal lives. Overall this essay will be discussing the tragic suffering that took a great toll on holocaust survivors, Specifically with psychological and bodily sicknesses, also including getting back to their normal lives. There were a lot of horrific ways prisoners in the Holocaust were badly altered. One way holocaust prisoners suffered was by mental illnesses because of experiences in the holocaust. An example of this is post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety disorders depression and this sometimes even...
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...Holocaust The Devil’s Arithmetic is a captivating story about a 13-year-old girl named Hannah who lives in present day America. Hannah is very neglectful of her Jewish heritage and its customs. During Seder feast she is asked to “open the door” for the prophet Elijah. She finds herself transported back in time to 1942. After being shanghaied and taken to the Nazi concentration camp, she has to use what she knows about the future to survive the horror, which is the Holocaust. I find that The Devil’s Arithmetic and the novel Night both illustrate the struggles and hard reality that occurred inside the camps. Holocaust means “burnt whole”. In this word, it symbolizes that Hitler had the idea to wipe out a whole race and by doing so he had to make the concentration camps and the crematories. Concentration camps were a place where Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and others persecuted in the Holocaust were sent to work or to be murdered by the hundreds. In concentration camps prisoners were humiliated, starved, beaten, forced to work and murdered in ways practically unimaginable. Some ways prisoners were killed were gas chambers, crematories, mass shootings, hung or starved to death. In the novel Night, the author Elie Wiesel witnesses a hanging of prisoners who tried to escape. In the Devil’s Arithmetic the same thing occurred and I noticed how both characters talked about the horror and fear on other’s faces. In the novel Night the French girl who helps out Elie is said to have dreamy...
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...clock television updates on prevalent issues. At a time when technology limited forms of communication, newspapers accumulated a majority of the responsibility for informing the public. Surprisingly, America as a nation, usually well informed and considerate of global issues and situations, left the Holocaust, the genocide of over six million Jews, Gypsies and handicapped across Germany and Poland, in the shadows of the concurrent war. Beginning in 1939, European countries engaged in a war that America clearly seemed unprepared to participate in. When America finally entered the war, the domestic concerns it faced at the time held precedence, even though it received news of the atrocities in Europe. The Holocaust, initially neglected as front-cover news, now holds a major concern and memory in American history. Since the start of World War II, strengthened and advanced reactions to the horrors of The Holocaust have ensued from simultaneously increasing publicity. As war broke out across Europe, Americans laid back, hoping to continue isolationist efforts. Still recovering from the Depression, newspaper companies held a large monopoly of the public information distribution (Holocaust). American citizens simply remained unaware that millions of people were suffering from discrimination and hatred. The New York Times, one of the most prominent publishing powers in America, held a delicate, complicated stance on the situation as news of the victimization and mass destruction of thousands...
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...Elie Weisel has a lot of credibility by how strong he was, by what he experienced during the holocaust. This quote creates the feeling of horror and sadness and it can help let everyone kind of understand the terrors of what those Jews went through. The tragic experience of the holocaust helped triggered emotions to all the audience. He used logic to as the hard-hitting questions about the unresponsiveness and repudiation among the Leaders of American and the people living here. All he wanted to know is why American didn’t do anything about the holocaust when they knew what was going on, why? Mr. Weisel had some very interesting points in his speech. He shows that there is a lot of anger and pain that in everything. He questions the past and...
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